What Is Green Coffee?
By Richard Johnstonn
It takes 4-5 years for a Coffee plant to start to produce flowers after it's planted. Fruits of the plants (commonly known as coffee cherries) appear on the flowers. It takes about 8 months for cherries to ripen and turn into a red color from green. The entire crop can be picked up at one time by machine or hand, but the most practiced and better way is to only pick the ripe ones by hand since the red ones have lower organic content and higher aromatic oil making them more fragrant, mellow and smooth.
Processing:
Wet Process: in this process the seeds/beans are removed the fruit covering, then are immersed in water bad or unripe will float and the good ones sink to the bottom.
Dry Process:
This is one of the oldest methods of processing coffee, cherries are first cleaned and placed in the sun to be dried before winnowing, winnowing is the process in which a large sieve is used where all the unwanted cherries and other material can be separated.
Now the final step milling starts when all the finer cleaning and polishing comes into the play before the coffee is sent to markets, the process includes hulling, polishing, cleaning and grading.
Coffee lovers love green coffee because of the freshness they receive in every sip. Green coffee once roasted turns into dark color and may not stay fresh or aromatic once sold to a consumer for too long, consumers buy coffee and roast it according to their needs, green coffee can be roasted in number of ways from specialty equipments to non specialty equipments like a stove top pop corn popper, an air pop corn popper or an oven, whatever method you choose it does not take more then 10 minutes.
Latest research has proved green coffee is very effective on fats and greatly reduces it. It is a top choice for people looking to reduce weight while researchers at University of California believe that extracts of green coffee beans can fight AIDS.
What Are Green Coffee Beans?
By Katya Coen
When coffee berries are picked off the plants, they do not go straight to being roasted beans that you can grind and brew into that cup of coffee that you are familiar with. They first take the form of green coffee beans, which essentially are unroasted beans.
The beans are actually the seeds of the coffee berry. To get them, the flesh of the coffee berry is taken out, usually with the use of a machine. This is done only after the berries have been carefully sorted through according to color and degree of ripeness. After the flesh of the coffee berry has been removed, you are left with the seeds, or the coffee beans. These are then fermented so that the slimy mucilage left coating the beans are removed.
After fermentation, the coffee beans are then soaked and washed in lots of fresh water. This is to further remove the residue left over from the fermentation process. Also, this process of washing the beans with water leaves you with huge quantities of what is termed as tainted coffee wastewater.
Nonetheless, at the end of the whole process you get coffee beans which, once dried and sorted through, are now considered green. These beans are then roasted to make the beverage that most of us are familiar with.
There are many different varieties of green coffee beans. Among the more popular ones are organic, and even decaffeinated ones, Jamaican blue mountain, and Hawaiian. Specific examples of organic green coffee beans include Cenaproc and Colonial Caranavi from Bolivia; Poco Fundo from Brazil; Cauca, Popayan, Ocamonte, Norte Caldas and Sierra Nevada from Colombia; La Alianza from Costa Rica; San Mauricio Pipil from El Salvador; Huehuetenango from Guatemala; Peaberry from Tanzania; Ermera from Timor; and Mandheling from Sumatra.
When buying green coffee beans, be sure to be on the lookout for possible flaws which are common to them. For example, these beans may turn out faded, as when they have been over dried or have been exposed to too much moisture. Also watch out for so-called amber beans, which are a result of deficiencies of certain minerals in the soil, and which will result in bitter-tasting and flat coffee. Green water damaged beans are another set which you must avoid, as these are moldy and toxic to the body as a result of fully processed beans undergoing a chemical reaction with water. Over-fermented green coffee beans, which are brownish and appear soiled, will result in roasted coffee that smells like rotting flesh - and that is something that no coffee should ever smell like!
